And is it possible to be both proud of one’s country and ashamed of aspects of its history?
If there are dark patches — things some would like to forget or cover up — why bring them to light?
Those are some of the questions that Donald Shriver Jr., a Presbyterian minister and the former president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, considered in a recent address at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
The seminary was bestowing on Shriver the 2009 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds. And Shriver, a retired ethicist, used his March 5 speech as an opportunity to challenge the idea that patriotism requires staying silent.
In his book, Shriver writes about the history of Germany and South Africa, and what he calls two great “original sins” of the American experience: the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans.
Raising such issues “swims against a very powerful tide in American culture,” one that “rushes toward the future,” Shriver told his audience in the seminary’s chapel.
Some might contend that “most of the perpetrators of these great crimes are dead and gone,” he said. “It is easy in a future-loving culture to dismiss public attention to these pasts as merely academic — it’s just history. But there is a hitch: the legacies of the crimes persist, especially in the minds and memories of those people in the society whose ancestors and whose own selves have suffered the most from those crimes.”
Some may ask “Isn’t what’s done already over with?” But Shriver contends that “history can be changed in the sophisticated sense that we change our relation to it. We can change the ratio of celebration and mourning in that relation. We can ask of this past if it delivers to our present an agenda for repentance and forgiveness.”
To make his point, Shriver told stories. Think, for example, of:
• The 50th anniversary celebration of the end of the Civil War, in 1915, when black war veterans, who risked their lives fighting for a united country, were not permitted to march.
• What historian Roger Wilkins’ mother said when she finally shared with him accounts of her slave ancestors — and he asked why she’d never revealed those family stories before. “Well, Roger,” his mother said, “I guess it is like the old folks used to say: We didn’t want to clink our chains.”
• The reaction of a Howard University professor to visiting slave-holding cells in Ghana, saying the horror of slavery hit her full-blast when she saw in a museum a tiny shackle, big enough only for the wrist of a child.
• What Shriver learned in researching the history of the arrival of whites in Jamestown, Virginia — retracing his own formative history. It’s estimated that at least 5,000 Powhatan Indians lived in eastern Virginia in 1607, but only 2,900 remained in 1669 and only 600 in 1699. “Most embarrassing for us latter-day Christians is the theology that some of those European settlers promoted as justification of Indian disappearance from the landscape,” Shriver said. One claimed, “It is to be admired, how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God.”
Some take the view that patriotism — support of one’s country — should be “unambiguous,” as former President Ronald Reagan described it, according to Susan Garrett, a professor of New Testament at Louisville Seminary, who introduced Shriver.
But Shriver asked: “Is it right and possible to express one’s love for a national past by new combinations of pride and shame regarding the past?” Or to put it another way, what’s the value of taking a stand against the bumper-sticker lesson of “America: Love it or Leave it.”
To answer that, Shriver told more stories – from Germany and South Africa.
In Germany, students and those preparing to enter professions, are taken to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, and to a mansion in Berlin on a lake called Wannsee to see a piece of paper Nazi leaders used to total the number of Jews they planned to wipe out — 11 million people.
And those who visit Wannsee are asked questions such as:
• If you had been the engineer of a train taking Jews to Auschwitz, would you have declined the job?
• As a librarian, would you have refused to remove books criticizing Nazis from the shelves?
• Would you have protested orders to shoot Jews?
“These are devastating questions,” Shriver said, “for they probe the dilemmas of ordinary citizens in the face of dangerous political pressures. They tell us that ordinary citizens are partly responsible for the choices that a nation makes.”
